That is a naive thought, my friend. Canada has a roughly 800 billion$ dept to GDP alone and therefore is desperately in need of new residents who pay taxes, consume goods, and contribute to the civilian industry growth. Canada is not inviting hundreds of thousands of new permanent residents each year for charity. Foreign students and temporary workers are temporary measures to remedy this problem, permanent residents, on the other hand, are permanent solutions; and guess what, They know it.
I agree with you that Canada really need immigrants as new reinforcement in order to replace old population and add new driving force to the workforce. However, the COVID-19 has cause stagnancy in economy and increase unemployment rate, so I bet that the Canadian government cannot be persuade that letting hundred thousands of new people to enter the country could help them to recover the recession in short time while the pandemic is still out there with no new breakthrough of vaccine yet. Yes, the international students might be at risk of contracting the virus as well but as long as they have the money to afford compulsory insurance during their study program, they are allowed to stay. Moreover, the schools also have to ensure that they have efficient plan to deal with the pandemic and the international students have to comply with that or their study permit will be revoked.
I have no objection against their plan to tackle the virus spreading and keep their country safe. Moreover, I don’t think that it’s wise to issue visa and allow large amount of outland immigrants to come to the country at this moment . I only have one concern is that IRCC is not transparent enough to let applicants know exactly what is happenning to their applications in the meantime. If it’s because mine is stuck in a middle of an endless queue, at least they should have some sort of number of awaiting applications, how they are sorted (chronologically/alphabetically...), what is my ordered number and what is the ordered number of curently processing case, expected due date, why it takes so long for some officers to pick up and process applications, and ultimately some way to complain about such a long delay. For anyone who have got their applications approved or passed all, I don’t think there is any reason for you guys to worry anymore, since you’ve already being passed the evaluation stage and only have to wait until the day you get your visa. Mine is stuck there for eligibility review and there hasn’t been any update since last February. The worse is that even the case processing agent didn’t point out what was the reason for review required on my GCMS notes that I got.